When I went to Canada for graduate school, I didn’t really know much about Canada. I guess the most I knew was that Pierre and Margaret Trudeau’s marriage had disintegrated very publicly and very messily, and that Quebec had a strong separatist movement, and that its license plates proclaimed “Je me souviens” (I will remember), which I vaguely thought had something to do with the separatists who were unhappy being in a primarily English-speaking and Protestant country.
Frankly, I was most interested in Canada because the university was giving me money to come and study there — the stuff I was studying was why I went there, not because it was Canada. By the time I started my second year, I had come to enjoy Toronto very much, including the vast variety of relatively new immigrants. These made it always challenging to figure out what language people on the buses and subway cars were speaking and made grocery shopping always a chance to try some different vegetable or fruit.
I was fortunate to have friends who were intent on teaching that Canada was not the United States (I knew that, but didn’t realize exactly what that meant to a Canadian). They also continually taunted me about my funny accent. These were proud Canadians, some of them full of disgust for the country to their south (Reagan was president and the Canadian Prime Minister was seen as his lap dog). They wanted me to know more about Canadian history, because they knew a lot about US history and it was only fair.
My friend from Halifax told me stories about the Maritimes, including the Halifax explosion of WWI, as well as what being French Canadian meant to her family. Another friend paid her way through grad school by serving in the Canadian military. She wanted me to know that the Canadian troops were proud of their ability to fix anything with the equivalent of tape and paperclips; she told they could keep vehicles running for years past their sell-by date. I followed hockey, because it was what you did. I occasionally watched French-language television, although I usually relied on the subtitles. I watched a lot of SCTV and my evening news was from the CBC, although I didn’t watch very much TV, at least much less than I do now.
I did a few truly Canadian things: I was a member of a union and walked a picket line; I joined a friend’s family for a summer weekend at their cabin on a lake; I celebrated Thanksgiving in October; I bought clothes at The Bay, the last vestige of the proud Hudson’s Bay Company, which is now closing down after more than 350 years. I experienced a blizzard. There were a lot of things I didn’t do, including seeing more of Canada than just southern Ontario. But my friends certainly didn’t want me to think that Canada was just a northern US. And I don’t.
I also poured through Pierre Berton’s books about Canadian history. I brought one for my father as a birthday present and he then asked for one or two every time I came home. I recommend them most highly. If you want to understand something about Canada, it is there, There are still a few I haven’t read. It’s probably time to pull the books about the War of 1812 down and read about that conflict. Yes, it is time.
I loved living in Toronto. After I left, CBS ran the Canadian TV series “Forever Knight” on their late-night Crimetime After Primetime. I am still a member of a mailing list about the show, which still operates as a listserv, using its old structure. Half the dwindling membership are Canadian (we have lost members over the years to email changes, loss of interest, and, yes, to death). I have met many interesting people through the group, attended one wedding, and still am friends with a woman in Honolulu whom I have visited and has come to see me in Missouri and Kansas to watch total solar eclipses (I am trying to convince her to brave the heat to join me in Luxor (Egypt) in August of 2027 for the total eclipse then).
My two closest friends from graduate school are still my friends; One I primarily interact with on Facebook, as she lives in southern Spain now, and the other I see almost every time I go to or through London, as she lives and works there. The latter is still in our field, as am I. The one in Spain left before completing her Ph.D. and has taught English as a second language and yoga in Iraq, Turkey, one of the former Yugoslav republics (I forget which), and Spain. She is now enjoying Sangria on tap and living near a beach. Both are still fiercely Canadian and that means becoming ever more disgusted with the US. They know I feel much the same way at times.